He heard a dog growl near them. They had a dog? Why try to love something when it would die or bail? He'd had chickens in Colorado. Coyotes killed them. A dog. Truck killed it on the highway. A mother. Dead drunk. Dead dead drunk.

Where the hell could Ellie be? "Somebody keeps teeth," she'd said, when he threw his tooth in the trash. "Sandy Narlette kept baby teeth."

"Why?" he said. "For a necklace?"

She frowned. "For a box."

He shrugged. "She's still a foster mom. It's still a group home."

But maybe she'd gone there. When he'd first walked into that yard, seen Ellie with the other kids under that mulberry tree, he knew it wasn't a group home. It was a family.

That's what she missed so bad-a crowd of kids, no relation, a woman who thought she was some kind of angel. Taking any child, acting like it didn't matter. How could you love anybody that wasn't your own blood? Flesh and blood. Ashes to ashes. Sins of the fathers. Dust to dust. The Bible verses from the group homes he remembered. The whippings with belts and cords and paddles with verses carved into them. The one piece of chicken. The lonely bone.

He ran away from the group home once. Before he met Warren. He was watching the trains, and an old guy came up behind him. Larry thought, Fuck, this guy's gonna kill me, or I'm gonna kill him. Old guy with silver hairs like staples along his jaw. Old guy said, "Look. Watch him."

They saw a young man with a ponytail, long and straight like winter wheat, jump onto the slow-moving train. "See where he's goin?" The old man grinned.

"No."

"I asked him an hour ago. Said he was goin wherever. Nice place, huh?"

Yeah.

Wherever. Good place to go.

formica.

In the bedroom where purple night air drifted in through the screen and no one else breathed now, Elvia dreamed that her mother ran along a canyon like the Tarahumara people she'd seen on TV. Red bandanna over her hair, rope sandals on her feet, she padded along a trail. Elvia sat high on the path, watching. Ruby said this wasn't the real dream, only the entrance. Elvia lay down on the dusty path and told herself to sleep, curled like a baby.

Then her mother lay in a tub of water, her hair loose on the surface, floating like black roots. Her hands bobbed, too, palms down, and Elvia thought she was dead, her fingers motionless but for the water swaying. Then her mother smiled, looking down at her fingers spreading wide, the backs of her hands rising from the wet.

Elvia slept for nearly two days. When she woke, she heard crows screaming outside, and she remembered the flock in the pecan trees near the river, flying over H8red, dropping black wing feathers to drift through the palm frond roof and land on Michael's hair, disappearing.

The other twin bed was empty, and there was an empty crib against the wall. She touched the walls and imagined their breaths, hers and her foster sisters', condensed under the fresh yellow paint. Yellow. Safe for boys or girls. For any fuck-up kids who might show up.

She had examined her tattoos in the small mirror. They were dry-scabbed, the coating over them thick and grainy as a layer of decomposed granite. I didn't put the Vaseline on them like I was supposed to, she thought. Now they're probably gonna disappear. Fall off with the nasty scab. Then I'll lose the moths, too. My mother's and Michael's.

Now she looked at Sandy, across the table, then at the nest of spaghetti on her plate. Sandy moved her water glass back and forth. "When you first came, years ago, you didn't talk at all in the beginning." She touched Elvia's fingers. "Just like this time."

Elvia shook her head. She didn't know how to explain any of it.

"So start talking. You're not a little kid anymore." Sandy bit her lips, then touched them with the napkin. Cloth napkins with the same blue flowers, a little paler from washing.

Elvia glanced at her knuckles. Sandy's eyes were the light blue of the napkin-flowers. Her hair was still brown, her hands moving restlessly over the wooden table shined with lemon oil. Elvia recalled that, rubbing the oil in circles every Saturday. Chore day. She remembered the two big bedrooms in this house, the kitchen with the old white refrigerator and old white stove. This table, with only one place mat now.

She hadn't seen Sandy's husband, Ray, yet, and Sandy's bedroom was a different color now. Lavender and white, instead of green. The bedspread was covered with daffodils, and Elvia hadn't noticed any man things around. No wrenches or pliers on the counter, no oil cans or car magazines on the steps. She'd looked out the kitchen window at the closed garage. It had always been open, with Ray working on classic cars men brought to him for restoration.

"Where is everyone?" she asked, putting her clean plate in the wooden dish rack, nearly silver from years of dripping water. Leaning against the rounded edge of the counter, the same white Formica with gold flecks, she watched Sandy wash the pot.

"So you ask questions first? Then it's my turn?" Sandy grinned. "Nun," she said suddenly. "We had canned corn because all the kids would eat it. Once you were sitting right there on the counter, your favorite place, and you pointed to the label and said nun. But when you tasted it, you frowned like you'd never eaten it before. Rosalie said maybe you ate corn on the cob."

"I don't remember that," Elvia said. Rosalie-in the girls' old bedroom, there were only two of Rosalie's horse figures, some horse books, and her collection of boots lined up in the closet. She said, "You're all alone."

"Yeah." Sandy nodded, and that was it. She always has an explanation for everything, Elvia thought, when she followed Sandy outside. But not now.

The pink climbing rose sprawled on the trellis. "Dreamweaver," Elvia murmured.

Sandy's smile was broad as always, her lips cushiony-wide and the chapped marks like tiny fingerprints. "You remember that, huh?"

Elvia remembered the roses in heavy bloom along the driveway. Cecile Brunner, the small pink flowers smelling of lemon. Moon Shadow, glowing purple. Peace, with flowers that changed colors in clouds or sun. Sandy cupped a rose and shook out a spider. Elvia said, "Did you name her Rosalie because you always loved the flowers?"

"I didn't have any roses until she was about two," Sandy said, moving the hose so the water dripped onto the woody base. "I was tired just from trying to take care of her. Trying to know what to do. Rosalie's been in college for a year now. She wants to be a veterinarian. You know she likes animals way more than people." Sandy shrugged, but her blue eyes turned dark as the water in the puddle at Elvia's feet.

All those years, Rosalie had adopted birds with broken wings, lizards with chopped-off tails, cats who lived in the arroyo on the cans of food she left there. "She was good at school, good at science and math," Elvia said. "But sometimes she liked the cats better than us."

Sandy smiled now. "You know what? She was mad at me because all her sisters came and went. I think she dealt better with animals."

"She was happy when I left," Elvia said quickly, thinking of the arroyo, of all the times Rosalie said, "They're my real mother and father. Biological parents, okay?"

"She acted like that, every time, but you didn't hear her crying in the bathroom," Sandy said, brushing a spiderweb from the yellow stucco. "That's where she'd cry, when one of you left, because she thought I couldn't hear her." Sandy breathed hard. "You stayed here four years."

"When we were like, nine or ten, Rosalie used to get mad cause we ate so much. All the snacks. She didn't want to share."

"Rosalie wanted more the day she was born. Her first words, practically. 'Mo juice, Mama. Mo watty.' That was water. 'Mo paty.' That was paper." Sandy hugged herself, moving the hose with her toe. "And then with cookies, 'Nuddy one.' God, I haven't thought of all those words in a long time. Remember Chrissy? She couldn't say any r sounds. You guys teased her about Barbie, cause she'd ask . . ."

"Gulls, let's play Bobbies." Elvia laughed. "All day."

When they sat on the steps, Sandy's face looked gaunt, the hollows of her cheeks black in the faded light. "All you kids were different. Rosalie wasn't big on touching, even though that made me so sad. You didn't mind it. I think your mom held you a lot, because you were used to hands on your hair." Sandy smoothed the end of the braid, her fingers soft on Elvia's back. "The first time you came, I used to lie down with you. You were scared, crying out in your sleep. You missed your mother." She paused. "You were loved, Elvia. You might not believe it, but I do."

"How do you know?"

Sandy hesitated. "I don't know if you'll understand." She propped her arms on her knees. "You'd eaten. You weren't sure about my food. When kids have been neglected, like starved, they look at any food in a certain way."

Elvia thought of Lee's kids, of Jeffrey. She understood fine. "Did I eat?"

"Eventually. And when I touched you, especially when I tickled you, you didn't pull away."

"I didn't expect you to hurt me?" Elvia whispered.

Sandy nodded. "You'd been held and touched plenty. My hands didn't scare you. And you laughed." She nudged a pill bug off the steps. "Then you left after a year. You were gone almost four years."

"Did you get tired of me?"

"No, the social workers thought you wouldn't talk here because I couldn't speak Spanish. But when you came back, the worker said you hadn't spoken Spanish where you went."

"Why'd I come back?" she asked.

"I had asked for you. You kept moving around, and they wanted you in one stable place." She turned Elvia's face with her finger. "You never called me. While you were with your dad. Now you show up here in his truck, pregnant, looking awful. It's your turn to talk."

Elvia stretched out her legs. "I didn't call because we moved all the time." "She's not your blood family," her father had kept saying that first month. And then Elvia had decided that if she heard Sandy's voice, she'd be even lonelier. She remembered feeling very old, for the first time, staring at the Sands Motel pay phone, knowing she'd hurt Sandy's feelings to save her own.

"The truth?" Sandy said firmly.

"I didn't want to miss you." Elvia looked at the arroyo, at the fields pale with dry grass.

Sandy said, "Your dad didn't tell you about your mother? You didn't look for her until now?"

"He said if I wanted to be Mexican like her I better start picking crops or cleaning toilets."

"No-he wasn't that mean."

Elvia felt it in the back of her throat, like the iridescent floating top of root beer. She missed her father. How could she explain the feel of her father's rough hands over hers on the steering wheel? "He's not a good guy. I mean, to everyone else. But he is to me. We used to laugh about everything. Eggplant. Stupid commercials. He took me to the ocean once, and to the mountains." She knew Sandy wouldn't think he was a good father. "He got mad when I asked too many questions about my mother. I guess cause he didn't want me to get hurt." She paused. "But he was always in fights. And his girlfriend was into speed. Smoking it. And he was, too."

Sandy said carefully, "Not you. You didn't smoke anything."

"Not me."

"Because you know what that would do to a baby, right? I didn't even take aspirin when I was pregnant with Rosalie."

Elvia said heatedly, "So you were perfect, you ate everything good, and Rosalie has a huge college brain." Then she paused, adding softly, "I probably messed up. Already."

She told Sandy everything, the whole story from the beginning. The arroyo in Tourmaline, the cigarettes making smoke people to keep her and Michael company. The speed lab, the vapors she'd breathed in, the little girl. Then Mecca, and Tijuana, and Michael's face in the river bottom camp. His sad eyes, the moth dust of his memory.

"So you think you're five months along? Take a pregnancy test. And tell your dad."

Elvia lay her head on her arm, looking away. "I don't want to tell him."

"He's your legal guardian. You have his vehicle. You haven't thought about that?"

"What about my mom? If I find her, she could be my legal guardian." She took a deep breath, watching pepper tree branches wave like dark strands in the breeze. "You know the church where she left me. It's on a paper somewhere, right?" She kept her voice steady. "What did you do when I cried for her at night?"

Sandy sighed. "I put my hand on your side. You were so thin my fingers felt like they fit between your ribs."

"I didn't eat at all?" Elvia thought she smelled lime and cinnamon and corn. She watched the heavy nodding roses, the soil going black with wet.

"You ate. You were just skinny. Jade wasn't. You were all different. Your feet, your hair."

"You had all of us, and you remember all that? How do you know which words I said, the ones from my mom? Moon and sleep? Did you just say that to make me feel good?" Elvia watched Sandy bite her lips.

"I thought you knew me better than that," she said, turning off the water. "You should remember I never lie, not even to make someone feel good. Come here."

Inside her own bedroom, Sandy opened a closet, and Elvia saw stacks of shoeboxes with names on the ends-some she knew, some she didn't. Christine, Tammy, Ozelle, David, Billy, Jade, Danny, Bridget, Patrick. Elvia.

They sat on the bed. Some boxes had only a few pieces of paper, a toy truck, tiny socks, or a drawing. Jade's box had costume jewelry she loved to collect, and snowflakes she cut from white paper. Chrissy's box had Barbie clothes Sandy had made, with careful stitching on the skirts, and papers from the speech therapist, and a tiny envelope of baby teeth.

Elvia held her own box in her lap. Sandy's eyes glowed with tears; she held her lip tight between her teeth. "That's what Ray couldn't understand," Sandy finally said. "How I fell in love with every kid, and how I don't mind crying every time they leave. Even every time I get these out."

"He left?" Elvia asked. Ray. She and the other girls never knew what to call him. If they called her "Mom," were they supposed to call him "Dad"? The girls rarely saw Ray, since he was always at work or in the garage working on the cars. So they didn't call him anything-just said, "Here's your dinner," or "Mom says can you fix the toilet again?"

Sandy stood up and went to the window, blew a few leaves from the sill. "Yup. He got tired of doing the hokey-pokey with kids. With me. He's doing the pokey-jokey with someone named Bonnie. Open your box."

Elvia's box was full of watercolor pictures she and Rosalie had painted one summer, and pebbles and rocks. The beginning of her collection-such ordinary pink and white and gray gravel, stuff Ray probably bought for the driveway, and she'd been sure they were valuable. Baby teeth, a tie-dye tee shirt she'd made in school. Sandy pulled papers from beneath the shirt.

"Social worker stuff. And I wrote down some of those words you said, because I wasn't sure what they were at first and then I thought they sounded beautiful. I never heard any words like that since. Not Spanish or French. My mother was French. Your mother . . ."

Elvia looked at the rounded writing. "Sandoo. Wash. Cu-shu. Sleep. Yoo-oo. Moon." Her chest tightened like when she'd inhaled the smoke from Michael's wild tobacco cigarette, and then she felt a couple of hesitant pokes against her left hipbone.

Was it because she was finally sitting down? Or because she was scared again, this time scared that she was ready to give up on her mother? Did the baby come alive only when fear made her blood sound different in her veins, in the sac-thing around its head? Elvia put the lid on her box, pushed it across the comforter.

Sandy sat down on the bed again. "You know what? Every one of these kids was different. What their moms ate, what they did-all that was in them. Look, your baby's already getting fingernails and eyelashes and bones from you. And from the father. Does he want the baby?"

Elvia said, "No. I think he wants me to-" She didn't want to say the word. Abortion. "He's scared about Pampers and Cahuilla stories and songs. And he acts like tweaker tribe now."

Sandy held up her palms in confusion, and Elvia knew she wouldn't know tweaker, fader, sketcher-all the words for people using speed. She added, "He's only halfway around. He likes to stay high. I left him your number. His name is Michael. If he calls."

"Okay," Sandy said. She pulled her hair into a tighter ponytail, her wristbones showing like marbles under her skin. "What do you want? Here?"

Elvia stared at the face she'd seen whenever she tried to conjure up her mother. Blue eyes darker than Callie's, eyelids lightly purple, forehead with freckles like sand. She had wanted a quiet room, food, and the washing machine. Sandy's voice. Home. "I don't know," Elvia said.

"So if your mother's not here in Rio Seco, I'm just the backup mom? Food and a bed?"

Sandy had read part of her mind, as always. "No. I-I wanted you to tell me what to do."

"Okay," Sandy said, bringing out a home pregnancy test from the bathroom. "Pee on a stick. One minute. Blue stripe."

"Why?" Elvia swallowed nervously. "I already know it's true."

"Yeah. But I want you to pee on the stick and get started with the official, gross, undignified part of being a mother. You get pee tests and blood tests. You go to the doctor. Everything hurts from now on. It's not mystical or romantic. It's not about drinking tea or dreaming."

Sandy doesn't know anything about dreaming or being Indian, about the desert or my mother or Michael. She has a box with my baby teeth. That's it. Elvia grabbed the test and went into the bathroom. She peed on the plastic wand like the directions said. She felt way past stupid. She carried the stick out to the kitchen. "Here. It has pee on it."

"Pee doesn't scare me. And it better not scare you." Sandy didn't glance at the stick yet. "What scares me is teenagers-" Sandy made her voice high and girlish. "We were just kissing and something happened. I don't know, whatever."

"You're old. How would you know what they say?"

"I'm thirty-eight. I know cause I said it. I got pregnant with Rosalie. Everybody knows what happens. They kiss you and it feels good. End of thinking. But not end of story."

Elvia looked away from Sandy's reddening eyes. "That's why you and Ray got married?"

"Yeah. And he didn't understand the icky stuff, didn't want to do it." Sandy pointed. A blue stripe had appeared on the stick. Under her pee.

Elvia stared at the window screen, filled with evening blue, the black branches waving past. Doctors and tests and hospitals. She bent and cried on the counter, smelling the Formica, the remnants of onion and garlic. "I can't do this. I can't."